| West meets east in new CCE course offering
By Will Refvem
News Editor
Underclasspersons who have been wondering how to fulfill the cross cultural engagement requirement in the new core curriculum now have one more answer.
Next semester International Student Adviser Linda Bosch will be teaching a one-credit course titled “Across Cultures,” in which an American or Canadian student will be paired with an international student for the semester. The bulk of the course will be the North American student spending time “engaging” the culture of their partner, according to Bosch.
Ten hours will be spent in conversation, discussing various cultural issues, and the other ten will be spent doing things like eating dinner or going to cultural events together. Since international students are already experiencing a foreign culture, Bosch said the focus will be on exposing American and Canadian students to new and different things.
One American student who applied for the course said, “Growing and learning about God also means learning more about all of the people he created, and that means engaging and studying other cultures.”
Russian student Petr Kornilov, a freshman studying computer science, says he looks forward to meeting with a North American student to discuss cultural issues. As an international student, he is already immersed 24-7 in a cross-cultural experience, and this course will allow him to expand that experience.
Because the course is so new, students will have an opportunity to provide feedback on it, in the hopes that this first, experimental semester will help work out the kinks. Kornilov said being able to contribute his input about the course is one thing that appealed to him in applying for the course.
“Maybe if I can stick my opinion in somewhere, someone will listen to me,” he says.
Bosch hopes that the course will go a long way towards bringing international students and North American students together. International students at any college or university, not just Calvin—and not just in the United States—often find that non-international students don’t always understand the position they’re in. To those who grew up in North America, Grand Rapids is an eminently normal place, but for foreigners it is no doubt stranger than strange.
Some students who have done Calvin’s semester in China program, for example, have found it difficult to connect with local Chinese students—and the institution has a lot to do with it. In China there is a conscious effort to do the opposite of what Bosch and others are trying to do at Calvin.
“There wasn’t anything organized for us,” said one student who studied with the Calvin group at Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT) last semester. “You had to do it yourself, which is all the more difficult when you’re already in a strange country.”
As a result, the international student community at BIT is a tight-knit one, but one that is comprised almost exclusively of non-Chinese.
The students who take the Across Cultures course will have an opportunity to bridge a gap that is not easily bridged—and they can do so in a meaningful way—all while fulfilling a core requirement. Bosch hopes that people who participate in the course will leave with a desire for further cross cultural engagement, such as that found in Calvin’s numerous off-campus programs, both semester-long and interim programs.
The deadline for signing up for this semester has already passed, but students who are interested for next year will have the opportunity to apply towards the end of the semester. This semester 20 students applied for 12 spots.
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